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Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics

The Myth before the Myth Began

Version 1.0

February 2012

Richard P. Martin

Stanford

Abstract: An extension of earlier studies on the semantics of muthos, with attention to the language and perspectives of early Greek mythographers. Various mediated forms of story-telling about the mythical and historical past, orally and in written form, are examined. [Forthcoming, Proceedings of UCLA Conference on Mythography (April 2009) http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/conference_myth_program.html]

© rpmartin@stanford.edu

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The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. (Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction)

Two decades ago, a contextual analysis of the Greek noun that gives us the word

‘myth’ led me to the claim that it means, in Homeric poetry, an ‘authoritative utterance’,

and that muthos represents a unitary speech-act term comprising subcategories of rebuke,

command, and recollection.1 This paper is an attempt to fill out the rest of the story. How

does one travel, in terms of the semantics of muthos, from its Homeric meaning to the

more familiar sense in which the word signifies something much more like our ‘myth’ --

an unverifiable, probably fictional, account of gods and heroes, supernatural beings, or

distant ancestors? Such is the sense that the word seems to bear already in the 5th century

BCE, at least in the work of the historian Thucydides, if not that of Pindar and others.

While the full story still remains to be told in detail, here is an initial mapping of the

territory for such a future project.2

1 R. Martin, The Language of Heroes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989),

pp.10-88. 2 I am thankful to Józsi Nagy and Kendra Wilson for accommodating my slow thought

processes, providing in the form of the April 2009 conference at UCLA the ideal venue in

which to present ideas that have been simmering for the past twenty years.

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The semantic history of the term ‘myth’ is relevant to the present collective

volume for several reasons. Mythography, first of all, does not occur in a vacuum.

Whatever the medium--writing, acting, singing, or oral story-telling-- those urges that

motivate people to gather, fix, record, propagate, and employ mythic stories must be

investigated in terms of context and social function. Semantic analysis, in this regard, is

nothing less than the investigation of culture, in this case, that of the so-called ‘archaic’

period (roughly 750-500 BCE) in Greek-speaking lands. When recording or transmitting

a muthos, how did the individual distinguish the relevant piece of lore or verbal art from

other utterances, and what was the result, in terms of the development of ‘myth’

collections?

Second, mythography implies myths, plural: telling one tale does not make a

mythographer. As it happens--perhaps surprisingly, to those bound up in print culture--

circumstances for the accumulation and agglomeration of myths do exist prior to any

writing down of the myths. In other words, there are socio-poetic templates and protocols

even in an illiterate culture that shape the recording and selection of myths (and even,

what to call myths) once that culture turns to the new technology of writing. The gradual

transformation of the semantics of muthos from the sense of ‘authoritative utterance’ to

‘fiction’ should be seen as part of this social process. Essentially, the process illustrates

the reinterpretation of an (older) speech-act as a (newly recognized) genre of speaking.

But the genre itself--as such things do--gets attached to particular people and situations,

determined far in advance of any categorization.

These particularities we can see at work in stylized form already in Homeric epic

in the archaic period. But traces of the sociopoetic processes that transform the meaning

of muthos can still be detected in the writings by and about the first Greek

mythographers, those authors of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE whose work survives only

in fragmentary condition. These men, the earliest of those we know to have been engaged

in collecting and collating stories of the past, are usually considered from a retrospective

viewpoint grounded in the brilliant ‘intellectual revolution’ that centered on 5th-century

Athens. Thus, they are more often heralded as proto-historians (albeit of a primitive

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type).3 But if we choose instead to see them in relation to the eras that precede them, the

mythographers turn out to display the habits, motivations, and methods that one sees

already in Homeric depiction of myth--or, more specifically, of muthos-telling. In short,

one can detect a continuity between the dynamics of muthos-as-speech act and the

eventual, static product, a ‘myth’ in a book--a familiar modern artifact, but already, an

ancient invention.

Let us, then, think first of muthos as constituting the ‘myth before the myth

began’. A muthos was ‘venerable and articulate and complete’ inasmuch as the various

speech acts by this term in Homeric poetry seek the tone of authority; are never open

ended; and always have a point. They aim for completeness, for a conclusion. It is

probable, in fact, that the root underlying the noun form muthos is that found in the Greek

verb muô--meaning ‘to close’ the eyes or mouth. From the same root we have the words

mystêrion (mystery) and mystês (initiate), in both of which the notions of closure, and of

being closed off or excluded, are operative.4 In muthos, in the proposed sense of

‘authoritative utterance’, one sees a slightly different growth out of the action of

‘closure’: that found in English ‘conclusion’ (from Latin con-claudo, ‘close up’)--a

speech-act that trumps and prevents further speech-acts.5

Now, of the 160 or so speeches designated muthos in Homer, about two-thirds

seem to have nothing to do with storytelling, and so the muthos-to-myth linkage looks at

first sight rather unlikely. The regularly employed kernel form of a muthos in the Iliad or

Odyssey is a command, of the sort Agamemnon makes to the old priest Chryses at the

start of the Iliad, ordering him to leave and never come back begging for his daughter in

the Achaean camp (Il.1.26-32). ‘He enjoined a krateros muthos [a hard speech] upon

him’, which Chryses obeyed’ (Il.1.25; cf.1.33). Out of the larger group of speeches

identified by the poet or his characters as muthos, however, we can specify a smaller

3 For an account of Hellanicus and Hecataeus from this vantage point, see L. Pearson, Early Ionian Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). 4 On these connections see G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) p. 32. 5 On the parallel semantics of Latin concludo see Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) s.v. 1a. ‘confine, keep secret’ in conjunction with 5b. ‘define, state expressly’; and Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue Latine, 4th edition, ed. by A. Ernout and A. Meillet (Paris 1959), pp. 125-26.

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subgroup that one could just as easily translate with ‘story’ rather than ‘speech’. Or more

accurately, they can be viewed as speeches with supporting evidence. When Agamemnon

tells a disappointed Chryses to go home, he does not have to indulge in details.

Agamemnon is commander of Greek forces and holds the rod of power, the skêptron;

although the priest holds the skêptron of Apollo, might beats right in this case. But in

other cases, the stylized poetic representations show that one has to explain why he or she

has the authority to speak or act in a certain way, including the giving of commands.

Thus, ‘speech’ or ‘utterance’ segues into ‘story’, and often leads to a story about the past

that shores up one’s present positioning in society. Another way of putting this is to say

that no muthos in the sense of ‘story’ (straightforward as the tale may seem) ever comes

unaccompanied by the force of muthos in the sense of authoritative speech-act. Myth-

stories do something for you and against your opponent.

It is interesting, speaking of the skêptron, that this material symbol of power in

the imaginary world of Homeric poetry has its own relationship to muthos meaning

command, but also to storytelling. For instance, Odysseus, the good lieutenant for the bad

commander Agamemnon, acts as enforcer and sets about beating those who refuse to fall

into line after the abortive troop-rousing attempt in Book 2 of the Iliad. He tries to get the

rank-and-file to listen to their leader. The poet says ‘Whatever man of the common

people he found yelling, that man he kept driving with the skêptron and kept berating

with a muthos, saying “strange man [daimoni’]--sit still and listen to the muthos of other

people” ’ (Il.2.198-200). A bit earlier in the poem, we had learned that this very sceptre

had a back-story of its own. Hephaestus the smith god made it; the first recipient, Zeus,

gave it to Hermes. From him it passed to the mortal hero Pelops, who gave it to Atreus,

who upon his death left it to Thyestes, from whom Agamemnon got it (Il.2.102-08). In

short, when a common grunt gets hit with a stick and an order, there is a story to back this

up--if the skêptron could talk it could tell quite an authoritative, venerable tale. Surely its

owner, Agamemnon, can recite the same story, whenever it is called for, but usually he

does not have to. Put another way, behind every muthos-command is such a latent,

explanatory muthos-story, detailing why the speaker commands consent. The story,

detached from its context, will eventually look and feel, to later Greeks and then to us,

like ‘myth’. Imagine the ‘genealogy’ of the sceptre, for instance, removed from the

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immediate context within which the story clearly undergirds kingly authority: it sounds

like an innocuous tale, useful for establishing relative chronology, and the prestige of an

artifact, but not much more.

In Homer, these muthoi that precede and create the ‘myths’ are finely articulated,

usually long, tales. Their venerable quality comes from being put into the mouths of sage

figures like Phoenix, the advisor of Achilles, and Nestor, the preternaturally aged warrior

from Pylos. I will touch on two stories by these men, whom I shall name ‘sages’, then on

two stories by warriors. (Of course, Phoinix and Nestor and almost everyone else in the

Iliad are warriors, as well, but it is their role as sage advisors that becomes foregrounded

in the poem.) This rather artificial division of tales by the status of their tellers will

function as a heuristic device when we then turn to the corpus of early Greek

mythography. What will emerge is in part a tale of continuity, but one with an interesting

breakpoint.

To begin with the ultimate storyteller, Nestor: in Book 11 of the Iliad, he is in his

hut recovering from battle when Patroclus, the companion of Achilles, enters to find out

the latest news about who has been wounded. Nestor proceeds to entertain or harangue

Patroclus with a speech 150 lines long, in which he recalls in great detail a cattle raid, a

reprisal move against the men of Elis, and evidently his first experience of fighting.6 This

is an initiatory tale, the reflection in Greek epic of a sub-genre of ‘boyhood deed’ stories

such as we find incorporated into the Old Irish saga Táin Bó Cuailnge.7 Usually, the Iliad

6 For a thematic analysis of the speech, see R. Martin, ‘Wrapping Homer Up: Cohesion, Discourse, and Deviation in the Iliad’, in Intratextuality: Greek and Roman textual relations, ed. by A. Sharrock and H. Morales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 7 On the origins of the Greek tales of raids, see, P. Walcot, ‘Cattle Raiding, Heroic Tradition, and Ritual. The Greek evidence’, History of Religions, 18 (1979), pp. 326-351. For the relationship of Homeric epic to the Irish material, see D. F. Melia, ‘Some Remarks on the Affinities of Medieval Irish Saga’, Acta Antiqua Hungarica, 27 (1979), pp. 255-61. On the later development of this subgenre, see Joseph Nagy The Wisdom of the Outlaw: The Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1985).

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chooses to suppress such tales of pre-Trojan War conflict.8 After describing how he was

forced to go to the post-raiding battle on foot, because his father thought him too young

to fight in a chariot, Nestor draws the paradigmatic conclusion: he fought for his

community, but Achilles is refusing to battle for the greater good. Patroclus is expected to

relay this story to his companion. And to seal the message, Nestor brings up another

recollection: how at the start of the Trojan expedition he and others went to the home of

Achilles and Patroclus, and what their respective fathers had said. In other words, Nestor

is ventriloquizing--almost morphing into the form of--the young fighters’ fathers.

Achilles had been told to excel and be superior to others; Patroclus (says Nestor) had

been told to act as advisor to Achilles (Il.11.783-90). Nestor’s own advice is for Patroclus

to recall this function, so that he might beg Achilles to let him wear the hero’s armor and

enter the fray as a sort of decoy. Of course, this sage advice of Nestor will soon get

Patroclus killed.

To be as transparent as possible: like many speeches in the Iliad, this one is not

framed with reference to either muthos or its contrasting lexical item, epos (word). What

justifies including Nestor’s speech here as muthos? The overall typological study of the

160 or so thus designated speeches shows that long recollection, along with commands

and flyting (the exchange of blame language) are the speech genres marked by the term.9

By extension, with attention to its function and similarities to other such utterances that

are explicitly marked, we can safely call Nestor’s recollection a muthos. Supporting this

point is the fact that when Nestor himself refers, within the speech, to his earlier attempt

to persuade Achilles and Patroclus to join the expedition, he calls that utterance a muthos

(Il.11.781). We can imagine his signature rhetoric as it would have unfolded in that

episode, and thereby extend the term he has applied to it to this example of the same

rhetorical act.

It may be significant that persuasion in the Iliad, even in the form of a muthos like

Nestor’s, so often goes wrong. Very often, persuasive rhetoric half works. I am still not

8 The Odyssey does deploy one such story of initiation, to great effect, in the famous flashback concerning how Odysseus acquired his scar: Od.19.392-466. 9 Details in Martin Language, pp. 45-70

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sure what that means.10 Another example, even more elaborate than Nestor’s, is by the

sage figure Phoenix, who makes his one and only speaking appearance in Book 9. He

fails to get Achilles to agree to re-enter battle, but at least prevents him from storming off

in his ship within hours, as he had threatened. Phoenix begins his muthos (again not

explicitly so designated) with autobiography, as had Nestor--a Faulkneresque tale of

sleeping with his father’s concubine and having to leave town, then of his service as

Achilles’ guardian, getting spit up on by the baby hero, and so forth (Il.9.434-95). He

turns next to an allegorical paradigm: Achilles should not reject the Achaeans’ gifts and

entreaties, because Prayers personified (the Litai) are daughters of Zeus and deserve

honor (Il.9.502-14). Finally, Phoenix brings up a tale not related to his personal

biography--the story of Meleager, who hid himself away in anger at his kin during an

attack by the Curetes, and despite the entreaties and promised gifts of his family and his

community of Calydon, did not emerge until it was too late. He never got the gifts--re-

enter battle now, says Phoenix to Achilles, and you at least won’t miss getting paid

(Il.9.524-605).

These are examples, then, of tales about the past being recollected by persons at

least partly involved, in order to persuade a listener about the right course of action.

Phoenix’s speech is the more interesting because--like many story-telling events recorded

by ethnographers--it is a messy combination of folkloric genres: autobiography, parable,

and what actually resembles “myth”--a story of a hero, Meleager, whom he did not

personally know, but whose story has become emblematic of how one should not act.11

We easily detect the ‘myth’ within the muthos in scenes like this: such a tale, denuded of

the surrounding context and its rhetorical framework, could slide without alteration into a

10 The Homeric poet’s attention to failed rhetoric seems to be of a piece with his concern for differentiation in speech-style, even across ethnicities, on which see H. Mackie, Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). 11 On the combination of genres marking typical Egyptian epic tale-telling events, for example, see D. Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes:The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

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handbook of ‘Myth’. But what needs stressing is the tale’s function as language-in-use: it

is not a static set-piece but a constituent of various dynamic speech-acts.12

Next to these figures of older men who dispense advice to Achilles, we can place

two scenes involving younger warriors. Diomedes in the Iliad is explicitly a neophyte,

one whom Nestor identifies as not yet having reached the perfection of speaking muthoi

(Il.9.55-56). In Book Four, Agamemnon picks on him. The troops are preparing for

battle. The commander says to the young Diomedes, in winged words ‘why are you

cowering?’ That was not the way Tydeus acted (Tydeus being the father of Diomedes):

Agamemnon proceeds to tell how Tydeus had once visited his own home city, Mycenae

‘but I never met him or saw him’. In other words, for Agamemnon this story is already

folklore, if not myth. Tydeus, he goes on to say, later went to Thebes, annoying the

inhabitants by challenging them all to deeds of strength and winning, thus so enraging the

Thebans that they ambushed him on the way home. Tydeus killed 49 out of the 50 sent

against him. Agamemnon does not elaborate on Tydeus’ later career at Thebes--how for

instance he was caught gnawing the skull of a dead enemy. But he leaves the sting in

Diomedes: such a man was better than you in battle, though you are better at talking.

Diomedes does not deign to reply (Il.4.364-400).

The point is that Agamemnon uses a muthos/command and a muthos/story to back

it up in the mode that scholars of Old English and Norse saga call ‘flyting’--this is

elaborate blame, meant to spur on the addressee to fight.13 A similar flyting event comes

in Book 6 when the same Greek Diomedes enters the battle and confronts Glaucus, an

ally of the Trojans. Diomedes speaks first, asking Glaucus whether he is a god (as he is

not supposed to fight divinities). Even a mighty hero of the past, Lycurgus, lost

grievously when he tried to fight the divine Dionysus, observes the young Diomedes. He

proceeds to tell the tale, in a dozen lines (Il.6.130-41). It sounds like myth, a story of gods

and humans in the past, yet it has a context and a point. Even though it is not personal

12 An excellent further survey on oral storytelling in Homer, with broader discussion of innovation, and an extended folklore bibliography is L. Edmunds, ‘Myth in Homer’, pp. 415-441 in I. Morris and B. Powell, edit., A New Companion to Homer (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 13 A useful summary is Ward Parks, ‘Flyting and Fighting: Pathways in the Realization of the Epic Contest’, Neophilologus 70, (1986), pp. 292-306.

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history, it remains highly relevant to the personal situation at hand. (One can, by the way,

understand the whole sequence as ironic, basically ‘trash-talking’ on the part of

Diomedes). He ends up saying ‘if you are not a god--come and fight, so that you sooner

enter the coils of destruction’ (Il.6.142-43)

Now the camera shifts to Glaucus, who, instead of being rattled, has his own

muthos and myth to tell. He traces the lineage of the trickster of Argos, the mortal

Sisyphus, and then talks about the grandson of Sisyphus, Bellerophon, the Chimera, and

the ancient hero’s experience with a seductive woman, the whole tale sounding like it

comes from a handbook of mythology. Only at the end of the long story do we learn that

Bellerophon is in fact Glaucus’ own grandfather (Il.6.206). So myth--in the sense of tale-

telling about the heroic past--is employed in the service of self-presentation in the heroic

present.14 It is also meant to take the wind out of Diomedes. Remarkably, the Greek has a

comeback: he claims that his own grandfather Oineus acted as host for Bellerophon long

ago in Argos, for twenty days, and they gave each other gifts. This makes the grandsons

guest-friends, too, and therefore they should avoid one another’s spear, says Diomedes

(Il.6.215-26). The scene can be read as all the more brilliant if it is in fact ‘myth’ in the

later Greek sense of lying fiction, an improvisation (unverifiable on the spot by Glaucus)

that saves his opponent’s skin. Diomedes is the one who, after all, appears to rook

Glaucus right after this speech, cornering him into giving up his gold armor in exchange

for Diomedes’ bronze gear worth slightly more than one-tenth its value.

In sum, the Iliad shows us story-telling tied to muthoi, whether of long sage

recollections that act as paradigms or slightly shorter genealogical tales that function to

challenge warriors. A fairly straightforward conclusion about Greek mythography can be

made at this juncture. Whether the Iliad records conditions in the 12th, 8th, or 6th

centuries BCE, or some amalgam thereof, we glimpse a world in which there are living,

breathing myth anthologies. Sage-advisor figures must possess a repertoire, based partly

on their own experience, but including famous precedents of the past. One story alone

does not suffice; persuasion requires versatility and variety. Not surprising, that. But

14 Note that Glaucus in his tale quotes his father Hippolochus (son of Bellerophon) as having told him to excel and be superior to others (Il.6.208), exactly the words that Nestor quoted as having been uttered by Peleus to Achilles (Il.11.784), in a speech where Nestor mythologized his own past by way of offering a paradigm for behavior.

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warriors, it emerges, are also men of muthoi, walking tale anthologies, and they, too,

must have a ready stock of stories, at least relating to their own genealogies and their

claims to authority. The latter requirement is illustrated most strikingly in the wonderful

opening scene of the Old Irish story of Mac Dathó’s Pig, in which the awarding of the

champion’s portion has to wait until every hero has had his say about how his own tribe

defeated the others. The talk runs something like this: ‘Our people killed your brother’.

‘Oh, well I cut off your friend’s head’. ‘Yes, well I’m the one who cut off your father’s

hand’, says another warrior. ‘Forget that-- I’m the one who put out your eye with my

javelin’, and so on until the warrior Conall Cernach arrives, just as another, Cét, is about

to carve the animal and award the ‘hero’s portion’.15

‘Get up from the pig now’, said Conall. ‘But what should bring you to it?’ asked

Cét. ‘It is quite proper’, said Conall, ‘that you should challenge me! I accept your

challenge to single combat, Cét’, said Conall. ‘I swear what my tribe swears, that since I

took a spear in my hand I have not often slept without the head of a Connaughtman under

my head, and without having wounded a man every single day and every single night’. ‘It

is true’, said Cét. ‘You are a better hero than I am. If Anlúan were in the house he would

offer you yet another contest. It is a pity for us that he is not in the house.’ ‘He is though’,

said Conall, taking the head of Anlúan from his belt, and throwing it at Cét's breast with

such force that a gush of blood burst over his lips. Cét then left the pig, and Conall sat

down beside it’.16 Laconic rhetorical statement is topped with a visceral flourish, the

corporal evidence to back up Conall’s assertion.

The Greek material is less direct, and its warrior muthoi are more prone to cite a

more distant past, the deeds of father and grandfathers. But the upshot is the same:

fighters need the equivalent of a handbook knowledge of stories, their own and their

opponents’, to rate as players. Warriors turn out to be as much transmitters of ‘myth’ as

bards and wise men are.

15 The tale is most readily available in J. Gantz, Early Irish Myths and Sagas. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); Irish text in Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó, ed. Rudolf Thurneysen (Dublin. 1935). 16 Translation from N.K. Chadwick, An Early Irish Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927).

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It is time to turn now from the roots of the mythographic enterprise, as glimpsed

in Homeric poetry, to the branches and flowers, appearing in fragmentary writings of the

Classical period attributed to men collectively known as mythographers. In Greek they

are called various things, and since the citations of their words and works are usually in

much later authors, it is hard to know what a contemporary term would be to describe

them. Logopoios, ‘account-maker’ (as used by Herodotus at 5.125.1) would probably be

the best bet.17 I pass over with only a sideways glance the all-important 6th century, but it

is in that era that the transformation of muthoi (in the sense of stylized speech-acts) into

‘myths’ (in the sense of pure stories of the past) must have gained ground. Marcel

Detienne, in The Creation of Mythology, would go so far as to suggest that the spread of

writing, which enabled the recording and comparison of widely varying versions of what

people had previously thought their own true stories, brought about a new semantic

development, in which muthos came to mean something like our modern ‘myth’ in its

sense of false story.18 But Detienne’s analysis has to be revisited, especially since his

reading of Pindar’s use of muthos in his 5th-century victory odes just does not hold up.

Pindar, instead, can be seen to use muthos as a neutral ‘story’ or even as in Homer, as an

act of speaking. But that is another story.19 Relevant to Pindar and to the development I

have been mentioning is the survival into the 5th century of a genre of speaking based on

the advising function of muthos that we have seen at work in the Iliad. Leslie Kurke

usefully lists all the compositions that we know about in which a mythical advisor figure

17 On this word and the later logographos, see Early Greek Mythography, ed. by R. Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) xxiii-ix; Hecataei Milesii Fragmenta ed. by G. Nenci (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1954) xxii; Pearson, Historians, pp.6-9; and C. Calame, Mythe et histoire dans l’Antiquité grecque (Lausanne: Payot, 1996) pp. 41-45. 18 M.Detienne, The Creation of Mythology, translated by M. Cook. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). See also Calame pp. 9-18. 19 The few instances in Pindaric poetry, pace Detienne, only acquire the sense of false story by being modified by negative adjectives (e.g. Ol.1.29: dedaidalmenoi pseudesi poikilois--muthoi, ‘stories elaborately adorned with variegated lies’; cf. Nem.7.24-5). Further detail in R. Martin, ‘Nemean 7 and Pindaric Hymnologic,’ (forthcoming). Note that even Aristotle in the 4th century BCE can preserve a neutral sense of muthos as simply plot or story: Calame, pp.26-28.

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instructed someone.20 These include the Instructions of Cheiron the Centaur; sayings of

Rhadamanthus and Pittheus; and a logos of Nestor to Neoptolemos, composed by the

sophist Hippias of Elis (cf. Plato, Hipp.Maj.286a5). From the perspective of Homeric

poetry, this shows a continuity of presentational technique: it is the act of speaking, set in

a distant past, that authorizes the content of these directive utterances, usually rather

bland but useful stuff like ‘be good to your friends’ and ‘respect your parents’. Once

again, a medieval Irish parallel comes to mind in the genre of tecosca or ‘instructions’,

attributed to various mythic and heroic characters such as Morann.21

Given the symbiotic relation of muthos to myth, of command, recollecting, and

flyting to the deployment of actual ‘mythic’ stories, already at an early period, can we see

any survivals of these contexts of utterances when real mythography--the writing down of

stories--actually starts in the late 6th or early 5th century BCE? The following

investigation involved reading through the authors contained in Robert Fowler’s excellent

new edition of the mythographers (while feeling very much in need of the promised

second volume, containing notes and commentary). Ninety percent of the citations from

the twenty-nine mythographers collected by Fowler are not particularly helpful in

answering the question of the continuity of performance or presentation habits. We

usually learn, often via later marginal notes to authors like the 3rd century BCE poet

Apollonius Rhodius, that a certain mythographer had told a different version of some

story. Sometimes all we discover is that mythographer X had also used the unusual word

Y in his version of events. That is the nature of the fragmented ancient evidence. But on

other occasions we can glean something of the circumstances, methods, motivations, and

reception of the mythographers. And when we do, the picture looks remarkably like the

Homeric depiction of muthos-deployment. That is to say, sages and warriors are the

predominant templates, if only metaphorically. Even when writing down myths, from

whatever their sources, these authors, almost all prose writers, are working with the

20 L. Kurke, ‘Pindar’s Sixth Pythian and the Tradition of Advice Poetry’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 120 (1990), 85-107. 21 See the edition by Fergus Kelly, Audacht Morainn (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976), and on the parallels with Hesiodic and Homeric embedded passages of the advice genre, see R. Martin, ‘Hesiod, Odysseus, and the Instruction of Princes’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 114 (1984) 29-48.

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problems and urges of the Homeric muthos speakers. Here is a brief mythographic

dossier that can illustrate the point.

The figure of the sage advisor is represented by at least one 5th-century

mythographer, Pherecydes of Athens, who flourished around 465 BCE.22 The Byzantine

encyclopedia known as Suda (‘Fortress’) dates from the 10th century CE, but has been

shown to contain good information dating back at least to Hellenistic scholars of the 3rd

century BCE, and earlier to Aristotle. According to the Suda, Pherecydes is credited with

inventing prose--a new art form, to which the canonical poetic tradition gradually yielded

in the course of the 5th century (Suda phi 216 = 4.713.23 Adler). He wrote about

Athenian history--which is to say, largely Athenian genealogy-- in a book appropriately

called Earth-Born Men, (as the Athenians considered themselves autochthonous). Like

many, he is tied to the transmission of Orphic traditions, which are all-pervasive in the 6th

and 5th centuries. But most interesting is the Suda’s note that links Pherecydes to a

composition in hexameter verse called Paraineseis, or ‘Advisings’. For this word can

describe the sort of speeches made in the Iliad by Nestor and Phoinix, as well as the later

poetic work attributed to Theognis of Megara in the 6th century.23 The hupothêkai

(‘instructions’) and related works surveyed by Kurke are in the same tradition (although

she does not mention Pherecydes). In other words, we have a figure writing down the lore

of his native city-state, involved in religious or ritual lore (tied to Orpheus) and also

penning the sort of muthoi one can find in Homer, in the same meter as Homeric verse.

Pherecydes of Athens strikes one as being like a verbal equivalent of the so-called

‘bilingual’ pots, those vases from the early 5th century BCE that feature the newer

technique of red-figure painting on one side and the older black-figure on the other,

sometimes depicting the same mythological scene.24 I list him as “sage” because his

genre of parainesis is that of the advisors we have seen.

22 The most complete study is now P. Dolcetti, Ferecide di Atene: Testimonianze e frammenti (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004). 23 For the social context and poetics of Theognis, see G. Nagy and T. Figueira, edit. Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 24 On the pottery type, see B. Cohen, Attic Bilingual Vases and their Painters (New York: Garland, 1978).

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Another famous mythographer from about a generation earlier (circa 560-480

BCE), flourishing around the time of the Persian Wars, is Hecataeus. The historian (and

part-time mythographer) Herodotus has something of a competition going with

Hecataeus, since he, too, is an Ionian, from Asia Minor, and also traveled to places

Hecataeus went. As we see in a passage from Book Two (143.1-4), Herodotus is pleased

to take Hecataeus down a notch. When his predecessor went to Egypt, and told the priests

he could recite his own genealogy extending back for sixteen generations, they smiled

indulgently (so we imagine) as they led him through him their own line-up of statues of

past eminences, by which they reckoned back twice as long. Their lineage did not go

back to a god; so how could that of Hecataeus? At least, that seems to be their point. We

never learn what Hecataeus responded, but this is a neat example of deflation through

multicultural contact. Is the muthos cherished by Hecataeus, regarding genealogical self-

presentation, a lie? Or just an unfortunate example of Hellenic naiveté? 25Another

significant point arises from the tale: we see the mythographer Hecataeus doing what

Homeric heroes did in their own self-presentation, toting up their own heroic past, tracing

their lineage back to the gods whenever possible, and boasting about it. Either Diomedes

and company possessed the mythographic habit avant la lettre in the form of an oral-

traditional accomplishment. Or, to be open-minded about dating, the composer of the

Homeric epics was already in touch with the developing mythographic habits of local

writers, perhaps in Athens of the 6th century BCE.

If a Greek mythologized himself, by recording an ancestry that reached back

sixteen generations to the gods, this might seem harmless enough, albeit an obvious

power-play in performance, from our vantage point. In the absence of documentation--

that is, in any oral culture--the assertion of Hecataeus can go unchallenged (like that story

Diomedes tells about his grandfather). It is “sage” behavior inasmuch as it is venerable

and complete--not subject to the warrior-style of flyting and counter-myths. When the

person doing the genealogizing is a doctor, however, we are on the cusp of another style.

As we know from the work of Geoffrey Lloyd and others, doctoring in the ancient world

25 The contemporary philosopher Heraclitus, also an Ionian, apparently thought the latter, as he lumped Hecataeus with Pythagoras, Hesiod, and Xenophanes in a set of those whose broad erudition (polumathiê) did not impart intelligence (12 B 40 DK = test. 1 Nenci).

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was a competitive activity, making use of public display and agonistic diagnosing.26

Thus, when Hippocrates of Kos traces his lineage twenty generations all the way back to

Heracles, son of Zeus, and Asclepius, son of Apollo, we are looking at some serious

credential claims. The mythographer who steps onto this playing field is putting into

action something more like a warrior use of muthos. Pherecydes (among others such as

the learned Eratosthenes) apparently approved the Hippocratic boast (Soranus, Life of

Hippocrates = 175.3 Ilberg). Pity those poor doctors who could not enlist their own

genealogists to document similar bloodlines. Again, we are talking about self-assertion

and self-presentation, by means of ancestry tracing---not unlike the proud statement of

Glaucus in the Iliad, that he descends from Sisyphus, son of Aiolos, who was grandson of

the original post-Flood human survivor, Deukalion.

With this mention of the other prominent muthos style, let me turn to some more

noticeable ‘warrior’ traits in Classical mythographers. Perhaps the most famous

declaration of the allegedly new Ionian spirit in enquiry comes from Hecataeus of

Miletus, as preserved in the later work of Demetrius On Style (Ch. 12). ‘Hecataeus of

Miletus thus declares with authority (hôde mutheitai): I write these things as they seem to

me to be true. For the tales told by the Greeks are, as it appears to me, many and absurd.’

We should translate the verb mutheitai, which derives from muthos, with the full force of

that noun as we see it in Homeric poetry. Otherwise, if we translate as ‘makes a fiction’

or even more neutrally ‘tells a story’, the mythographer’s opening manifesto loses its

force. What he means to say is that what we will read in his work on genealogies is true--

-the opposite of muthos in the later sense of ‘fiction’. For ‘tales’ (the untrue stories that

he finds absurd) he uses the Greek word logoi. At the same time, however, we should

note the slight dissonance between his declarative mutheitai-- in the third person--and the

phrase ‘as they appear to me’ (hôs emoi phainontai) with its reference to the first person.

Part of this style we come to see later in Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom refer

to themselves in the third person in the prooimia of their historical accounts. But in those

authors, there is no ‘me’ in close vicinity. The effect in Hecataeus might be to increase

26 G.E.R. Lloyd, The Revolutions of Wisdom (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987) pp. 83-108.

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the emphasis on the authority of his utterance. It sounds legalistic, more like ‘Hecateuas

attests’ to the following.27

One man’s silly stories, of course, are another’s truths--always the problem with

myth. We wonder, when reading passages like Hecataeus’ history of the early Aetolian

kingship, how many other somewhat implausible events got seriously recorded by

Hecataeus as part of his Genealogies. According to this narrative (Athenaeus, Epit.2.1 =

Fowler fg. 15), Orestheus, son of Deucalion, on his way to assume the kingship, found

that a dog of his gave birth to a stalk (stelekhos). He ordered the stick to be buried and

from it there grew a vine with many clusters of grapes. He therefore called his son

Phytios (“Productive”); a grandson was named Oineus (“Winey”) after the vine, who

became father of Aitolos, the eponymous ancestor of the region’s people. Perhaps the

stick the bitch birthed has significance beyond its apparent role in the story---after all

scepters too are sticks. Achilles in the Iliad talks about Agamemnon’s as if it were a dead

branch (Il.1.234-39), that will never more produce (phusei) leaves and branches. The

stalk produced by Orestheus’ dog, on the other hand, is marvelously productive. Who

would defend this story? Plenty of Aetolians, no doubt. What does Hecataeus owe them?

We don’t precisely know, but one can easily imagine the flyting of myths and counter-

myths in which this sort of story makes sense, claims to kingship being pretty serious

things.

The evidence suggests that Hellanicus, another mythographer of the 5th century,

is entangled in just such claims and counter-claims.28 This time they are not about

kingship but about a kin-slaying queen. The scholia (marginal notes) to line 9 of

Euripides Medea (produced 431 BCE) include an apparently widespread story, that

Euripides got paid five talents by the Corinthians to blame Medea for killing her own

children. Previous versions of the tale, we are meant to conclude, blamed the Corinthians

themselves--or, if you believe Didymus (the ‘Bronze-Gutted’ scholar almost exactly

27 On the paradoxical expression, see further Calame p. 30. Nenci xxiv-vi explains the sentence as referring to the absurdity of there being multiple versions of each story, all posing as true: polyphony is the mark of the phoney. Pearson p. 98 sees an allusion to Hesiod’s Muses (Theogony lines 27-29) who tell both truth and fictions like the truth. 28 On his mythographic, as opposed to ethnographic and chronographic writing, see Pearson pp. 157-93.

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contemporary with the Augustan poet Horace--it was the relatives of Creon (Medea’s

victim) who had the children killed and then blamed Medea for infanticide. The existence

of a reparation ritual at Corinth seems to argue for an old version in which the

Corinthians are to blame--or, at least, blamed themselves. The story as given in scholia

ad Medea line 264, citing the grammarian Parmeniscus, is an aitiological tale, according

to which it was the women of Corinth who slew the children at an altar of Hera. When a

plague struck the city, an oracle specified expiation to appease the wrath of Medea’s

children and Hera through the annual sending of a delegation of seven boys and seven

girls who were to live and sacrifice in the goddess’s precinct.29 Now the scholia tell us

that the mythographer Hellanicus as well as the mysterious writer Hippys are sources for

details of the life of Medea in Corinth. Could Hellanicus also have promoted this story

about Medea’s guilt, that absolves the Corinthians and puts an Athenian playwright--

Euripides-- in a bad light? Both authors are named two sentences after the mention of the

bribery tale, although it is not directly attributed to them. Perhaps this is a fetch too far,

but if we consider the motives and opportunities of the case, it is not insignificant that

Hellanicus comes from Lesbos. He is said to have lived from about 490 to 405--that is, he

was almost exactly contemporary with Euripides. And we should not forget that Athens

did some cruel things to Lesbos in the later 5th century. After the unsuccessful revolt by

Mytilene from the Athenian empire in 427 BCE, the Athenians voted to slaughter the

entire male population. Only second thoughts and a last-minute intervention saved the

town. Even at that, 1000 rebels were executed.30 There were several important citizens of

Lesbos, which is a big, rich island. But it is interesting that Hellanicus is said to have

come specifically from Mytilene. The Athenians had their own reasons for demonizing

Medea, ancestress of the Medes, after the Persian War. But Hellanicus (whose polis was

nearly destroyed by the Athenians) would have excellent reasons to believe that the

Athenians were corrupt and not to be trusted.

29 On the associations of this cult with apotropaic and initiatory rites, see S.I. Johnston’s full analysis, ‘Corinthian Medea and the Cult of Hera Akraia,’ in Medea:Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, ed. by S.I. Johnston and J. Clauss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 44-70. 30 Thucydides, Histories, 3.50.

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The agonistic use of myth, then, continues the flyting, blaming, agonistic use of

muthos as we see it in epic. You might object that the world of the early 5th century BCE

is not that of heroic duels. Yet, in a way, it is so even more. Consider the normal

conditions in which someone setting out to record ‘myths’ in that century would find

himself. It is a commonplace that all politics is local: so is myth. Pausanias reports (2.1.1

= Fowler fg. 1) that the land of Corinth is named after Corinthus. ‘That Corinthus was a

son of Zeus, I have never known anybody to say seriously--except the majority of the

Corinthinas’. Pausanias says further that Eumelus, a member of the powerful Bacchiad

family, and the supposed author of an epic poem Corinthiaca (though Pausanias is

hesitant about the attribution) explained that Corinth had formerly been named Ephyraea

(after a daughter of Ocean) but Marathon, an Athenian who had fled to the area and lived

there some time, allotted the land to his son, after whom it got its new name. We do not

know how or why Eumelus switched the paternity of Corinthus from a god to a mortal

(albeit a heroized mortal, in Attica, to which he later returned).31 Perhaps this represents a

convenient compromise, or even a minority ideology fostered by the ruling Bacchiad

family: note Pausanais’ phrase ‘the majority’ of the Corinthians when referring to the

belief in Corinthus as son of Zeus. It has the advantage of linking an ancestral figure with

Attica, a way of making a claim either of guest-friendship or territorial ownership. As

great-grandson of the Sun (Helios), Marathon is related to Medea, whom, as we have

seen, at least one segment of Corinthian society desired to disown. Most likely, we are

viewing dimly a faction fight fought on the mythopoeic level, in which every small re-

adjustment of the story packs a punch for some interests: myth once more as muthos.

In these conditions, it is inevitable that mythographers either take sides, or

eventually are perceived as doing so. This is no doubt a commonplace in medieval

studies, when every minor kingdom, monastic site, and bishopric jostled for authority and

used saga to establish its claims. Glastonbury and Arthurian myth come to mind. The

city-state configuration of Classical Greece is not much different in discursive practices.

Spreading literacy, shifting political tides, and the need to claim land all collaborate in

31 There may be a further rationalizing urge at work, as a story was also attributed to Eumelus that pinpointed a location in human terrain (in Lydia) for the birth of Zeus (Lydus, Mens. 4.71). Fowler (p.109) attributes the testimonium to Eumelus ‘Pseudepigraphus’.

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putting mythographers on a rather hot seat. Why would a Hellanicus or Hecataeus even

attempt to construct a universal Greek genealogy of all city states? We have no explicit

reference to their motives. But just as Homer is depicted in the Lives tradition (circa 6th c

BCE in origin) as a poet who wanders into town and produces a composition about local

history, for which he is rewarded, so too mythographers must either have, or expect to

gain, patronage.32 Eumelus, the poet and member of a powerful clan, is a sort of

aristocratic gun-for-hire. The prose-writing logopoioi, on the other hand, might be of

middling origin but they no doubt learn from their poetic brethren. And the poets

themselves are still in the game, by the way, through the 5th century. At the end of

Nemean 7, a complex ode written for a victorious athlete from the island of Aegina, the

poet Pindar says (lines 104-5), ‘I do not have to keep repeating myself, like people

forever babbling “Dios Korinthos” [i.e., ‘Corinthus comes from Zeus’] Pindar thereby

aligns himself with people who are tired of Corinthian propaganda or inimical to the

city’s power, and at the same time, with a segment of Corinth’s population (represented

at one stage by Eumelus) who felt the same way, when they demoted Corinthus from son

of Zeus to son of Marathon.

That mythography was never neutral can be imagined from the few examples

already given. One senses that sometimes rather strange variations in detail--not

obviously involving the claim to power--were concocted simply to give myth-recorders

more status. How else might one explain the information given us by the mythographer

Acusilaus that the Golden Fleece, affirmed by most people to have been golden, was in

fact purple? (scholia ad Ap.Rhod. 14.1146-48= Fowler fg. 37). Does Acusilaus know

something most people do not? Does he have a privileged source for this minority view?

Or is this a case of providing authentic, realistic detail (as he apparently said it became

purple “from the sea”)? On other occasions, mythographers seem to be picking fights

with poetic predecessors just to appear more rational, or even simply for the sake of

differentiation from tradition. Hecataeus, for instance, writes with some disdain:

‘Aigyptos did not go to Argos, but his children did--fifty of them, as Hesiod has it

32 For the ‘Homeric’ practice, see R. Martin, ‘Read on Arrival’, in Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture Travel, Locality and Pan-Hellenism, ed. by R Hunter and I. Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 80-104.

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[literally ‘made it’ i.e. in poetry: epoiêse], but, as I think, not even twenty’ (scholia ad

Eur. Orestes 872 = Fowler fg. 19). Whatever the motive behind that move--rejecting as it

does the common poetic trope of fifty offspring (Nereids, daughters of Thespius, etc)--it

makes life easier for the genealogist to get rid of thirty extraneous characters.

In some cases, nevertheless, already in antiquity the mythographers’ cover was

blown. Strabo the geographer lived more than three centuries after Hellanicus, yet he may

have a reliable tradition at his disposal when he fingers his predecessor as gratifying

(kharizomenos) the inhabitants of Troy who were the mythographer’s contemporaries by

writing that their little settlement was actually the same as the great city of Priam (Strabo

13.1.42 = Fowler fg. 25b). Hellanicus, in gratifying the audience of Ilium, acts in a

manner that is hardly different from the hired praise-poet’s relationship with the

commisioning patron, a relationship of kharis or reciprocal gratitude.33 We need not

attribute this interpretation to Strabo, who writes with considerable hindsight. It is not

unlikely that the ideology of ‘reciprocal gratitude’ was operative in the world of the 5th-

century prose writers as it was of poets.

Pindar, as his odes show, was highly conscious of avoiding the appearance of paid

partisanship. Praise has to look natural, acclaim must seem immediate and universal. His

solution was to resort to an elaborate rhetorical system in which the athletic victories that

he was paid to celebrate somehow organically and spontaneously elicited his exertions as

laudator. He strove and exercised his art as hard as did his victors because their glory

demanded his poetry and vice versa.34 Here it seems we can find another parallel with the

mythographers, but one that takes us in a different, unexpected direction. If, as I have

been suggesting, the muthos-asserting tactics of Homeric imagination actually structure

the later writing down of myths, we might think that the force of self-assertion, the threat

of a live performance with its power to overwhelm opposition and gain consent, is

somehow diminished or even defused by the use of the new technology. Doesn’t writing

33 On the representations in literature of this archaic notion, see B. MacLachlan, The Age of Grace: "Charis" in Early Greek Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). For analysis of the kharis relationship in Pindaric praise-poetry, see L. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 34 Salient examples of these tropes are discussed in the classic study by E. Bundy, Studia Pindarica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

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change everything? Is not the ‘graph’ in mythography a key? Not necessarily. We are far

enough now from the Great Divide theories of orality and literacy, as propagated

especially by Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, to begin to appreciate phenomena that in

fact jump the gap, continuing oral habits into the written world. Mythography is one such

phenomenon. Starting from oral-performative roots, it flourishes even in the allegedly

harsher climate of script. Eventually muthoi get stripped of their immediate contexts of

use, with all the original pragmatic variables of speaker and setting, and become pretty

stories--hero-tales and genealogies. But, as should appear from the examples already

cited, that eventual outcome--the purely cleaned-up and motiveless tale--has not yet come

about by the 5th century BCE. Sides are still being taken, ‘myth’ has still the immediacy

and authority of muthos, and it fits the gratification culture of kharis in patron-client

relations, provided we substitute, on occasion, city-states and their factions in the place of

aristocratic individuals and families. And of course, the former are in most poleis simply

transformations of the latter, as the history of Athens well shows.

Looking at the situation in this way may help us understand two final and rather

odd stories. You could call these myths of mythography. They both have to do with

writing, and they crop up in the biographies of mythographers. Pherecydes--whether the

Athenian or the earlier man of the same name from the Cycladic island Syros--is said to

have taught Pythagoras, but was himself an autodidact. Or, not quite. Pherecydes

acquired knowledge, and trained himself (heauton askêsai) by the book: specifically, the

secret books (apokrupha biblia) of the Phoenicians (Suda phi 214 =Fowler fg.1).35 We

learn from the Suda, as well (alpha 942 =1.87.20 Adler) that Acusilaus of Argos had a

similar experience. His composition called Genealogies was written ‘from bronze tablets’

35 H. Schibli, Pherekydes of Syros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 81 believes the story is about the man from Syros and sees the reference to Phoenician books as part of a doxographic tradition that argued for general Near Eastern influence on Greece, stemming from Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE). Fowler, following Jacoby, places the Suda testimonium under ‘Pherecydes Atheniensis’ (fg. 1). Dolcetti, pp.28-31, outlines what she sees as the funzione politica precisa of the genealogical work by Pherecydes of Athens in connection with the politics of Cimon. If the story of knowledge from books does relate to the Athenian (rather than the man of Syros), it could act as a protective device to defend the mythographer’s genealogical work against charges of partisanship. The immediate context in the Suda passage, however, is about eschatological and cosmogonic writings.

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(ek deltôn khalkôn) which emerged in the course of a building project involving the

excavation by his father of part of his house.

It is not the historical or archaeological likelihood of these discoveries that

fascinates one so much as the insistence on distance in the myth-learning process, spatial

in the case of Pherecydes, temporal for Acusilaus. Such distancing makes sense if the

closeness and the personal self-assertiveness of archaic myth-telling has indeed remained

a problem for slightly later myth-writers. Saying ‘I say this’ sets you up to be challenged.

On the other hand, finding the story already packaged, whether written down in biblia by

Phoenicians or engraved on tablets by previous residents of your property in the Bronze

Age, lets you tell the untrammeled and de-personalized truth. Even the opening sentence

of the work of Hecataeus (hôde mutheitai) encapsulates this paradox: to hold off

challenges, the writer distances himself, using the third-person instead of the first, while

employing a verb that must retain the sense of ‘makes an authoritative assertion’.

If mythography, finally, results in the endless stripping away of situation, a

denuding of speech-acts in favor of pure plot-lines, we have to recognize the roles and

motivations of mythographers in the process. They are not ethnographers, and certainly

not interested in providing thick descriptions of the tale-telling event. The tales survive

precisely because they are deracinated, made available for public consumption and re-

performance in a number of contexts, defused for purposes of entertainment; and they get

that way because writers no doubt wanted to avoid charges of self-interest. In the poem

with which I began, from Wallace Stevens, the narrator asks:

‘Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?’

To which our mythographers would no doubt answer--yes; do so; provided it is someone

else’s volume.